Phosphorescence

by Julia Baird

Studies have shown that awe can make us more patient and less irritable, more humble, more curious and creative — even when just watching nature documentaries.

We are joined to the Earth in ways we barely understand. In 1984, American biologist E.O. Wilson coined the term ‘biophilia’ for an innate love of the natural world, which he argued is intrinsic to being human.

Kwaymullina says, ‘In the learning borne of country is the light that nourishes the world.’

In my view the simplest explanation for our intense connection with nature, our biophilia, remains the most plausible: we hanker for the sight of green and blue, for the Earth of our ancestors, the sea of our origins, and the feeling on our faces of the sunlight that first nurtured life. We sense this instinctively, it’s in our wiring; which makes it even more confounding when we choose to ignore it, and allow vast tracts of wilderness to vanish or burn, noise to creep across once silent hills, plastics to choke oceans, and years to pass without pausing to lie under trees as we did when we were children, and stare up through the branches.

‘First is the sheer, raw experience of confronting an elemental force of nature — uncontrolled and unpredictable — which is at once awesome, magnificent, dangerous and picturesque. Few life experiences can compare with the anticipation of a chaser while standing in the path of a big storm, in the gusty inflow of warm, moist gulf wind sweeping up into a lowering, darkening cloud base, grumbling with thunder as a great engine begins to turn.’ Then there was the ‘experience of something infinite, a sense of powers at work and scales of movement that so transcend a single man and overwhelm the senses that one feels intuitively (without really seeking) something eternal — but ephemeral — almost a conscious thought, but just below the surface. As when a vertical 50,000-foot wall of clouds glides silently away to the east (intermittent, distant thunder) and goes golden in a setting sun against a deep, rich azure sky, one can only pause and look and wonder.’

Take rainbows, for instance. For millennia humans have tried to understand the startling magic of rainbows. In dozens of myths and legends they were depicted as an archer’s bow, a snake, a bridge. For Christians, rainbows have long been a sign of God’s grace, and a promise that the Earth would never again be destroyed by a global flood. For Buddhists, the rainbow body is the highest state achievable before attaining Nirvana. In some countries, the sight of a colourful bow spanning the skies was a fearful one: children scurried into hiding places to avoid looking directly at it (in Honduras and Nicaragua) or being eaten by a demon (in Myanmar); elsewhere, people closed their mouths, men nervously girded their loins. In Bulgaria, the superstitious said that if you walked under a rainbow, you would change genders, immediately starting to think like a man if you were a woman, and a woman if you were a man. In ancient Japan, Hawaii or Greece, rainbows served as bridges between the heavens and the Earth, the ancestors and gods. For Indigenous Australians, the sacred rainbow snake represents the life-giving creator. The first modern thinker to study rainbows — and show how they occur — was the French philosopher, mathematician and eccentric genius René Descartes, who believed that wonder was the greatest of the passions. In 1628, when living in the Netherlands and studying metaphysics, he heard about the spectacular appearance of a host of false suns — known as sun dogs or parhel...

Wonder prompts us to ask questions of each other and the world. It is also an antidote to distraction. As Robert Fuller, professor of religious studies at Fuller University argues in his fascinating book Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality, the experience of wonder is one of the defining elements of human spirituality.’ It fuels art, science and religion.

In greeting each morning, remind yourself of dadirri by blessing yourself with the following: Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.’

Now the rest of us need to insist our stories matter. Today, thanks to social media, we can, but we must also keep records of these stories. And not just the stories of triumph, victory or visibility, but of the liminal moments of our lives, and of the long, grinding nature of reform, the bitter, often boring struggle for freedom. Slash, destroy, pin on a pretty brooch, fade to static.

Rebecca Solnit is correct when she argues that ‘every protest shifts the world’s balance’ and urges us to remember the ‘countless acts of resistance on all scales that were never recorded’. To reinforce this idea, she employs the metaphor of the mushroom: ‘The mushrooms that spring up after rain are only the fruiting body of a far larger underground fungus we do not see; the rain causes the mushrooms to rise out of the earth, but the fungus was alive and well (and invisible) beforehand; the rain can be an event.’

This is why we should tell the stories — and value the experiences — of setbacks as well as those of incrementalism and movements, talk not just of grenades, shock troops, infantry, masterminds and strategists but also of stretcher-bearers, bandage makers and the injured, scarred, deserted and deeply flawed. The battlefield is vast, and even when the major conflicts have cooled and subsided from public view, someone is always fighting or striving on some patch, somewhere, sending up flares that are very rarely seen. Once they draw the eye, though, they are difficult to ignore.

‘We are all just walking each other home.’

That, as Aslan revealed in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, behind every earthly law is a deeper magic that defies logic: a forgiveness of the unforgivable, a selfless gesture, a moment of grace. That this grace fuels galaxies, that the sun powers the planet and the moon pulls the tides, but the universe is largely unknown, spinning and vast, and that in itself is an ode to curiosity.

What is to give light must endure burning.

— Anton Wildgans, Helldark Hour

God talks in the trees. There is a wind, so that it is cool to sit outside. This morning at four o’clock in the clean dawn sky there were some special clouds in the west over the woods, with a very perfect and delicate pink, against deep blue. A hawk was wheeling over the trees. Every minute life begins over again. Amen.

Christianity is at its most powerful when it is at the margins, or periphery, not the centre of power, and when it is identified with outsiders, not exclusive clubs, and with action, not finger-wagging. As Minniecon said, McIntyre ‘knew how to put his faith into overalls’.

My faith has endured despite all the rubbish I’ve heard about women and my queer friends, despite all of the hate mail and insulting messages I have received from conservative Christians who despise my feminism. My faith continues to exist because I have an understanding of humanity as screwed up, of male-led institutions as narrow — blinded by misogyny and sometimes very dangerous for the vulnerable — and a sense of God as large, expansive, forgiving, infinite, and both incomprehensible and intimate.

It is a great stretching for silence, a reaching for goodness, a resting in a peace that ‘passes all understanding’. A desire to learn how to love better in the face of my countless flaws and constant stuff-ups. A desire to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly. A desire many atheists, Muslims, agnostics, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs,

Muslims, Buddhists and others share. We’re all on this mad Earth together, bumbling about, trying to figure it out. There is so much we do not know. My problem with many church leaders is that they too often exclude and judge, defend harmful manifestations of patriarchy, complicate God and make the expression of faith more like digging a trench than laying down, or opening, arms.

‘They think of faith as an argument.’

FAITH MAY BE A form of living light but it is not neat and ordered. It exists in mess and chaos and doubt and brokenness. Which is something I have

I’ve never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors . . . Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all the wrong people. He spent his time with people for whom life was not easy. And there, amid those who were suffering, he was the embodiment of perfect love.

He always sent stumblers and sinners. I find that comforting.’

Faith is raiding the unspeakable. Grace is forgiving the undeserving. It’s a kind of unfathomable magic. And despite everything, if you can somehow try to let your life be your witness to whatever it is you believe, grace will always leak through the cracks.

Faith cannot block out darkness, or doubt. When on the cross, Jesus did not cry out ‘Here I come!’ but ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ His disciples brimmed with doubts and misgivings.

Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith then becomes a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs; it is not a detractor from belief but a crucial part of it.

If we don’t accept both the commonality and importance of doubt, we don’t allow for the possibility of mistakes or misjudgments. While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain. This is a subject far broader than belief in God. The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that ‘the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt’.

The mark of a civilised woman, too, is to doubt the wisdom received from men for so long — it’s remarkable how ancient and modern texts alike read differently when women have the chance to interpret them. The mark of a civilised person is to recognise that for a long time what we understood to be history — and theology — was history of the few written by the few, and that the voices and experiences of women, the disabled, the poor, the discriminated against, the queer, the black, the colonised and the ‘other’ have been seen through eyes that never understood what it was like to walk in their shoes, or dance in their bodies, or fight to be free from prejudice. Myths and ideologies have permeated every inch of our written histories, and there is a need for constant rethinking, revisiting and revision to shed stereotypes of the past and allow a full, bustling, diverse experience of history to be heard. We need to constantly doubt what we are taught and what we read.

‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought’, as Alfred Tennyson tried to.

Many who don’t attend church or adhere to any particular religion congregate on beaches, in forests and on mountaintops — to experience awe and wonder, to sense a ‘peace that goes beyond understanding’, the ‘sighs that have no words’, and seek ways to bring living light into their lives. Such sites are nature’s cathedrals of awe, places where we can sit alongside strangers in silence and understand what we share; where we exclaim at the firefly or the sea sparkles or the cephalopods because they are signs of the miraculous and they usher in a kind of quiet respect for the fantastic, the improbable and the marvellous, the things we can’t quite believe are real, alongside us, here on Earth, where land meets the sea.